Foreign Exchanges: The U.S. and the Wider World in the Twentieth Century

FAIN: ES-250835-16

Primary Source (Watertown, MA 02472-4052)
Ann Marie Gleeson (Project Director: February 2016 to March 2022)

A three-week institute for thirty-six schoolteachers exploring new perspectives for the study of U.S. identities and foreign interactions across the twentieth century.

The three-week summer institute we propose, "Foreign Exchanges: The U.S. and the Wider World in the Twentieth century," offers K-12 educators new perspectives for the study of U.S. identities and foreign interactions across the twentieth century - a century that forged the interconnected world our students inhabit today. Our course of study both complements and challenges traditional diplomatic history to bolster teachers' abilities to present a more thorough and nuanced account of American foreign relations, with a particular focus on the regions of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Teachers in the institute will look at the various levels, modes, and structures through which the ideas of the "foreign" were constructed and consumed by Americans in the twentieth century, and the consequences of those ideas. Teachers will gain fluency with the richly creative literature of twentieth-century transnational U.S. history and learn from some of the field's leading scholars.